1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a language translation system which performs translation from one language (original language) to another language (target language) using a computer. More particularly, the present invention relates to a language translation system which can automatically translate a sentence even when it contains one or more colons, semicolons, quotation marks, or parentheses, etc. which are herein generally called inserted marks.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A general idea how the computer translation is carried out from one language to another language will be explained. As shown in FIG. 1, a sentence of the original or source language is processed so that a word-to-word dictionary look-up is obtained, and then the source language is analyzed in the various steps, which are: morphological analysis; syntactic analysis; semantic analysis; and context analysis, to obtain an intermediate language which does not belong to any existing language, but can be understood only by the computer. The steps carried out in each analysis will be further understood from Table 1 shown below.
TABLE 1 ______________________________________ Analysis Steps Analysis ______________________________________ Dictionary look- Find a word in a dictionary and pro- up and morpho- vide its translation as well as other logical analysis word information, such as verb, noun, adverb, adjective, plural, singular, tense, person, etc, according to the stored grammar text. Syntactic Find a relationship between the words, analysis clauses and/or phrases to determine one or more possible sentence con- structions, each analyzed in a form of a tree structure. Semantic analysis Select one sentence construction which is most appropriate from the viewpoint of the meaning. Context analysis Understanding the theme of the sen- tence and to clarify the vague expressions. ______________________________________
After the intermediate language is obtained, the computer forms and generates a sentence in the target language through the steps of: context generation; semantic generation; syntactic generation; and morphological generation, which are similar to the above described analysis.
The above described method of the computer translation is called a pivot method in which the procedure follows the steps formulated by solid line arrows shown in FIG. 1 to obtain the intermediate language and then to finally obtaining the target language.
Another method is called a transfer method in which the procedure takes a short cut step formulated by one of chain line arrows to complete the translation without obtaining the intermediate language.
There have been proposed a number of translation apparatuses which can translate, through either the pivot method or transfer method, an original language, sentence by sentence, to a target language, and the translated result will be displayed on a screen.
A problem in the prior art translation apparatuses is that when the sentence of the original language contains one or more inserted marks such as colons, semicolons, quotation marks, or parentheses, the translation procedure becomes very difficult and complicated.
For example, when the original language sentence contains a colon or semicolon, the translation machine automatically and uniformly translates each inserted colon or semicolon to a most plausible translation in the target language. In some cases, the sentences with the colon or semicolon are translated correctly, but in other cases, the translated sentences are meaningless. In such a case, the operator manually provides proper translations or marks in the target language, thereby reducing the reliability of the translation system.
Another example is when the original language sentence contains parentheses. In this case, the operator usually deletes the parentheses together with the contents therein, so that the machine can translate the sentence without the parentheses and the contents therein. Then, the operator manually translates the contents within the parentheses and inserts the translated result in the machine translated sentence together with the parentheses. Therefore, it is very difficult to obtain a properly translated sentence having parentheses and the contents thereof inserted in the right place.
A further example is when the original language sentence contains quotation marks. In this case, each quotation mark is rendered as a word in the translation procedure. However, since the word order can change between the original and the target languages, the grammar for inserting the quotation marks can be very difficult.